Strategies to mitigate the impact of work disruptions include time management and boundary setting, according to Tulane’s Greg Oldham,Carol Kulik of University of South Australia and Florida State University’s Lee Stepina. They suggested that employees:

Women in Engineering or Information Technology organizations may find themselves the only person using the women’s restroom, one advantage in light of well-documented workplace challenges associated with minority status.
Men face similar challenges when they work in Human Resources, Marketing, or Communications, where more women are employed.

Group gender composition also negatively affected team cohesiveness: After 10 weeks, those who worked in groups with more women said they were less interested in working together again.

West and team suggested that women in work groups may be subject to “stigma-by-association,” when negative evaluations of a stigmatized individual spread to an associated individual.
As a result, men who work with women may be subject to a “contagion effect” and may be perceived as having similar stereotypic strengths and weaknesses.

Carol Kulik

Hugh Bainbridge

The prevalence of stigma-by-association in the workplace was conceptualized by University of South Australia’s Carol Kulik with Hugh Bainbridge of University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne’s Christina Cregan in a“masculine” performance task.
Women were evaluated as less competent at “masculine” tasks, and this negative evaluation was also assigned all group members through stigma contagion.

Michelle Haynes

NYU’s Heilman extended her work on women’s perceptions of their capabilities in an ingeniously-designed study with Michelle Haynes of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

They asked participants to work remotely with another person on tasks traditionally associated with a male role: Acting as a managing supervisor at an investment company.
Volunteers were paired with male or female “partners,” but each volunteer actually acted alone without a teammate.

In fact, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall.

Alexander Pentland

This means that a group’s performance is more dependent on interaction behaviors and norms than on individual cognitive capabilities.
These findings support Emotional Intelligence theory’s assertion that self-management and interpersonal behaviors are more important to individual achievement than measured intelligence.

Nada Hashmi

Wooley’s team assigned nearly 700 volunteers to groups ranging between two and five members to work on visual puzzles, negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments.
Collective intelligence of each group accounted for only about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.

Thomas W. Malone

The remaining 60% contribution to collective intelligence depends on members’ “social sensitivity“: Accurately perceiving each other’s emotions, and ability to more equally share conversational turns.Groups with more women excelled in both capabilities, and the team noted that accurate social perception and conversational turn-taking skills that may be further developed with attention and effort.

-*How can workplace Inclusion and Diversity programs mitigate the impact of stigma-by-association?